My Own Theory Is That A Majority Of The New Air Nation Is Made Up Of Former Earth Kingdom Subjects For

As someone who has an interest in sf/fantasy depictions of WWI, I’ve been puzzling for years as to why authors dabbling in steampunk have been reluctant to tackle the conflict. My own theory is that steampunk is, at heart, an American creation, and the Great War is an event that has mostly vanished from the American consciousness. For most American writers, steampunk is a fantasy world set in an imagined version of 19th-century Britain or America which draws more from other stories than from reality, and the question of international politics and war doesn’t really come into it. That said, I have found British authors working in steampunk to be far more willing to broach the subject of World War I, both because the war had such a huge impact on the British national psyche, and because it ties into the greater question of what Britain is, its relationship to the empire, what role Britain has in the world after empire, and so on. As for examples, two authors stand out to me. While a hard sf writer by trade, Stephen Baxter’s steampunk excursions always seem to be haunted by the war. His 1993 novel Anti-Ice is for the most part a romp about a 19th-century excursion from the Earth to the Moon thanks to the titular substance, an exotic form of antimatter. However, by the end of the book the use and exploitation of anti-ice has led to Britain, France, and Germany locking themselves into a Cold War-style nuclear arms race. His 1995 book The Time Ships is a sequel to the The Time Machine that riffs in all manner of ways on HG Wells’ work, but the middle third of the book is set in an alternate 1938 where the First World War has dragged on for decades, transforming Britain into a dystopian state influences by Wells’ most pessimistic views. (While I haven’t read Baxter’s 2017 followup to The War of the Worlds, entitled The Massacre of Mankind, some of the elements I’ve seen, like a police-state Britain and a bloody Russo-German war in Eastern Europe, suggests that the Martian invasion of the original book has become the Great War of the sequel’s world.) For something a little more literary, Ian R. MacLeod’s Aether duology, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), is set in an England where a magical substance called “aether” has locked the country (and by extension the rest of the world) in a sort of static industrial revolution for centuries in some ways reminiscent of Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968). Change does eventually come to this static eternal England, sadly in the form of a civil war whose depiction draws heavily from that of the Western Front.

I didn’t include it in the list of favorite stories because I like it more in idea than in execution, but Caitlin R, Kiernan’s story Goggles really hit me hard.  She says it was her idea of where all steampunk is leading, but most authors don’t want to admit: the conflict that became World War I in our world destroys the steampunk world in technologically advanced nuclear fire.  I read it yesterday and I can’t get the concept out of my head.

Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)

This feels like a forgotten Federation track from one of the old Starfleet Command games.

EDIT: Damn, didn’t read the comment @velacity made. Eh, great minds think alike, and so such.

Guys?  My fellow Trekkies?  People?

Some of you know this already.  Some of you don’t.  But this song was almost the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

No, I am not kidding.  I’m serious.  It really was.  They almost used this as the theme to TNG.  It’s even on the first soundtrack, the one with the music from the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint” if you don’t believe me.

Yes, this song was almost the TNG theme.

Seriously.

I mean it’s not horrible horrible, right?  But it’s… it’s not the TNG theme, you know? 

It really is very 1980s though.  I mean, you’d have to do 80s visuals with it, you know?  Not just text.  Picard would have to come on horseback galloping over the top of a hill.  Riker would have to do one of those half-turn-and-smile manuvers.  Troi would have shake her hair like a shampoo commercial.  Worf would have to do a toothy growl as he chopped wood with a bat'leth.  Beverly would have to be fixing Wesley’s uniform collar or something before turning to the camera.  Geordi would do the two-handed point-and-grin like Guy in the end opening credits from “Galaxy Quest” and Data would totally be painting a portrait of spot before spot knocked over the paints…

Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.

i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me

Just to jump on the bandwagon, “thot” is actual title used by the Breen, but it’s not certain if it’s a military rank or a political title. In DS9′s defense, they came up with it in 1999, long before thots were ever a thing. The Breen also dress in Leia’s Ubese bounty hunter disguise from RotJ, and their speech is an electronic riff on Metal Machine Music. They’re the weirdos of Trek.

one of my favorite tropes of all time is when the author tries to replace curse words with a more ‘family friendly’ alternative or invent new words for worldbuilding purposes but they use existing words that make the whole thing unintentionally hilarious out of context

Hmmm.

I don't understand how tumblr works.

I used to think that, but a few years ago an old opinion piece completely changed my mind on the subject. To summarize the piece’s argument (in case the site ever goes down), the key differences between superhero movies and westerns is that:

1. People go to see superhero movies because they like certain characters; people went to see westerns because they like westerns. To put it another way, if you want to see a western, the genre is broad enough that you can see all sorts of different movies. But if you want to see a superhero movie, you usually just want to watch Batman acting like Batman and doing Batman things, or Cap acting like Cap etc...

2. Westerns were small enough and cheap enough to make that directors and writers could experiment widely within the genre; modern superhero movies are so expensive that's there far more pressure to play it safe just so you’ll earn your money back.

3. Great characters usually only have a handful of truly interesting stories. A controversial point, but I think this gets at why superhero films tend to focus on either origin stories or constantly feel like retreads of the same ideas. 4. The actor is the draw of the western, while the character is the draw of the superhero film. With the western you can make different movies that emphasize different aspects of the actor’s persona or even have him play against type, while in a superhero movie the actor is something of an interchangeable widget that takes second place to the character. 5. At the end of the day, the audience doesn’t really want innovation or personal films all that much. This is only a crude summary of the piece’s arguments, so I really recommend reading the linked article above.

Superhero movies are the cowboy movies of our time.

@coppermarigolds, I suspect you will like this a lot.

“Grand moff kuvira”…